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298 the widows’ handbook Birthday Ellen Steinbaum And so I move another year away. I have a new haircut now, but you would recognize me still: I look exactly as if I were the same. You will not grow old or stooped or slowed. Caught in crystal time you wait while I wear out, while my body imperceptibly accumulates the weight of passing days that we will spend apart. I will be older than you will ever be. I will pass your age become so old that I am new, and change a minute at a time until nothing is left of who you knew, until the space between us lengthens so that one day if you saw me (if such a thing were possible) you would mistake me for a smiling distant relative, an elderly aunt from crumbling photo albums. You might sense a vague remembrance and wonder if we’d ever met. ...

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